[asterisk-users] How to park calls on a specific extension

[Brad Templeton]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 04:05:34AM -0800, Steve Langstaff wrote:
> > 
> > What I describe is different.   There are no shared lines, but if
> > you put a call on hold on one phone on a non-shared line you 
> > can go to another -- any other in the pickup group, whether 
> > it is registered to have the shared line or not, and pick it 
> > up, as you can (in a more cumbersome way) with call parking.
> 
> I'm a bit unclear on where you say 'push a button to pick it up'
> - does this mean that there can be only one held call 'shared' between
> the extensions, or is there some logic somewhere that 'knows' which held
> call should be picked up when you press the button?

In my view of the SOHO environment, you would put a call on hold.  That's
one button on most phones.

At the target phone, a speed-dial button would be configured to call the
"pick up held call" extension.   If there is only one call on hold in
the pickup group of that extension, it would simply connect that call.

Let's say the pickup extension is 600.

If there were more than one held call (quite rare in a home PBX) it would
instead say, "There are calls held for extensions 123 and 456.  Please
enter the extension you wish (followed by pound sign if there are
ambiguous patterns like extension 22 and 222 but hopefully nobody does
that!  Otherwise you have to wait a few seconds after 22 is pressed.)

In addition, you could also define so that extensions of the form
600xxx are a hard pickup of a call held by extension xxx.   Thus if
you want to be more reliable, or have a speed dial aimed at picking up
only a very specific extension with no chance of a menu, you could
do that.

I would implement this with a PickupHeld command, which can take an
extension argument, or no extension (meaning pickup any or give menu),
or possibly a pickup group argument so dialplans could allow pickup from
other pickup groups if you want to allow that for security reasons.

Anyway, for the user, the UI is very, very simple, especially in a SOHO
where mostly we're talking one call on hold at a time.

For security reasons, as noted, you would not be able to pick up a call
that was just put on hold in the last few seconds.  And an extension could
define if it wanted that calls it puts on hold are not available for
remote pickup to avoid any risk of accidental pickup.   Even then, they
might not want to use the parking lot system (which has no real security) but
just have to do an explicit transfer (like the xfer to 700, but no need to wait
for a number to remember)

For a large PBX serving several offices, you might want to expand the pickup
group concept to have a "master" grouping, or allow pickup group numbers to be
versioned.   Ie.  If I say "pickupgroup=2.1" then "2" would define my company,
and the 1 would be the traditional pickup group function within the company.
Just a thought on a good UI.  Obviously what's really more valauable is code.